I don't think I've ever attended Easter Sunday Mass in the evening. I don't mean the Vigil; I mean, an afternoon or an evening Mass held on Easter Sunday.
The Gospel reading for the evening Mass of the Lord's Resurrection, is, I think, the most appropriate of all of them for the situation in which we find ourselves today. That would be Luke 24:13-35, aka, the appearance on the road to Emmaus:
Now that very day two of them were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus, and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him.
He asked them, “What are you discussing as you walk along?”
They stopped, looking downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?”
And he replied to them, “What sort of things?”
They said to him, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over to a sentence of death and crucified him. But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place.
"Some women from our group, however, have astounded us: they were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; they came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that he was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but him they did not see.”
And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures.
As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther.
But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.
And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.
Then they said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning [within us] while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?”
So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them who were saying, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!”
Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
What have we got here? Our scene takes place not where "the eleven and those with them" are gathered together. Instead, two disciples are alone, dejected, no longer hoping, and headed (probably) home. And discussing and disputing about the things that had happened.
And what happens?
Jesus comes to where they are, teaches them, enters into their home with them, and blesses the food on their table.
They do not recognize him, but afterward they speak of how their hearts were burning. And later, as soon as they can, they rush back to the assembly to tell their friends (who are talking of what Simon Peter had to say) about their own, private, domestic encounter with the Lord.
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In the Vulgate, when the Jesus-they-don't-recognize rebukes the disciples on the road, he mentions their "stupid and slow hearts." I am very interested in the word "heart" as it appears in the Gospel and in Catholic pious tradition. Sometimes it seems to refer to an organ of the intellect, other times an organ where virtues such as courage and humility reside, other times it seems simply to be a part of the body. Belief lives there, belief in people (and indeed the verb credo is thought to arise from an Indo-European root meaning "heart"); but it's never a cleanly distinguished concept: whether this means intellectual assent to existence, or something more like fidelity and trust in. Or "setting your heart on" a person.
I've come to think of "heart" as standing in for the bleeding edge between the intellect and the emotions, the will and the action. It is, to me, the interface and the mystery of how our consciousness and our body coexist and co-produce: the place where the invisible diffuses across the veil into the visible, and vice versa; the place where our metaphysical choosing emerges as physical manipulation of matter, and where the actions and consequences of the interactions of matter (real matter: protons and electrons and neutrons, and more) burrows into consciousness and reverberates in the soul.
Contemplate the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary: we're talking about something that has to do with their bodies, but it's making something else visible as well.
The disciples on the road were discussing and disputing, using their intellect, their brains and their common language and shared experiences, to try to get at what they had seen happen. They were doing it while walking away from the community, quite understandably, and their efforts may well have been good ones, but this particular effort wasn't going to get them to where they really needed to go. (And really, could they have known it on their own?)
Here's another situation where having access to different translations helps---because in some of them the stranger on the road says the disciples are stupid and slow, and in some of them He says that the disciples are stupid, or "minds without intelligence," and their hearts are slow, and in some of them (e.g. Latin) he says their hearts are stupid and slow. In any case, there's something that isn't the intellect, called the heart, that isn't grasping what's going on. And he teaches them, and explains the Scriptures, and their hearts listen and are set alight. The mind wasn't enough. The part of us that can will, and love, and then listen and talk and act from that place of willing and loving, that is what is needed.
Hear with the heart; experience with the heart; speak from the heart: it is, I think, the place of loving and knowing and choosing that can also hear, feel, and speak.
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And this is what we have to do, no? We are sealed up each in our own tiny houses, receiving packages and messages from outside, sending packages and messages away. No-contact.
(This is a metaphor. Did you get it.)
But the metaphorical, liturgical, literary heart is a boundary, a veil, a membrane, a place of sure contact. Whatever it may mean, and I'm not pretending to know exactly, there is a way somehow we can choose to open it up like a parallel sluice to the senses. And those same packages and messages will go back and forth, but in a new way, with a new channel, a new way where heart speaks to heart an we aren't alone on the road anymore, nor alone in our houses, but with Him, and being with Him, being with everybody else, inside and outside of Time.
I love this. The Emmaus story is one I've pondered a lot in my life. When I was 8 my parents opened a Catholic bookstore and called it Emmaus. I used to go hang out there on Saturdays and help my dad and hide in the corner and read books. It was a word that was commonly on my tongue and the story was one I thought of again and again as I looked at the store's logo of three men walking into the sun which also looked like a stylized host, and at a painting of the encounter that my parents hung in the dining room.
I love your reflections here about the nature of the heart and of knowing and believing and loving that which we cannot see and touch.
This paragraph especially seems exactly right: "I've come to think of "heart" as standing in for the bleeding edge between the intellect and the emotions, the will and the action. It is, to me, the interface and the mystery of how our consciousness and our body coexist and co-produce: the place where the invisible diffuses across the veil into the visible, and vice versa; the place where our metaphysical choosing emerges as physical manipulation of matter, and where the actions and consequences of the interactions of matter (real matter: protons and electrons and neutrons, and more) burrows into consciousness and reverberates in the soul."
Also: "But the metaphorical, liturgical, literary heart is a boundary, a veil, a membrane, a place of sure contact. Whatever it may mean, and I'm not pretending to know exactly, there is a way somehow we can choose to open it up like a parallel sluice to the senses. And those same packages and messages will go back and forth, but in a new way, with a new channel, a new way where heart speaks to heart an we aren't alone on the road anymore, nor alone in our houses, but with Him, and being with Him, being with everybody else, inside and outside of Time."
I love the image of a new channel. It's really what we mean by the 'communion of saints' that we have a means of communication, of 'being with' that is that heart speaking to heart outside of time and space.
Posted by: Melanie | 12 April 2020 at 11:50 AM